| | By John Oram in California @ Saturday, March 21, 2009 11:51 PM
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| | This week, ITExaminer met Alan Snyder, president and CEO of Boxtone. He explained that Boxtone provides multiple integrated web-based consoles for monitoring an enterprise Blackberry installation. Snyder said that Boxtone has over half a million users and nearly 200 enterprise customers.
 Snyder said the Blackberry outages in 2007 and 2008 have raised the profile of smartphone and network monitoring tools. During those outages, most users started by pulling their battery and then finding a way to call their corporate help desk. If that user was one of the early callers to the help desk, they rarely got a straight answer.
ITExaminer asked Snyder why so many large companies have purchased BoxTone.
Snyder said their top 40 clients average 8,000 smartphones, but organisations with as few as 30 smartphones use Boxtone software to monitor their networks. He said that with nearly ten years experience, Boxtone reduces troubleshooting time at the help desk from roughly 20-30 minutes per trouble tag to less than 30 seconds in most cases. Snyder said that translated into hundreds of thousand of dollars in saved help desk man hours for their enterprise customers. He said that Boxtone has nearly a 97 per cent customer renewal rate, as well as a 30 day guaranteed satisfaction policy.
Boxtone's Blackberry monitoring solution not only monitored the Blackberry environment, but also Microsoft's Exchange Mail Server, IBM's Lotus Domino Mail server and interacts with their built-in account management tools.
Snyder said that Smart MP lies at the software's core. It is a patented technology that uses high-volume data collectors, analyzers and mobile pattern-specific rules engines to instrument and measure the actual performance end-to-end and 24x7 of all Blackberry users. He showed ITExaminer a beta version of their next generation of BoxTone monitoring console running on his Blackberry smartphone.
A bit of history about today's Blackberry smartphones: Starting in 1984, Research In Motion Limited (RIM) worked with RAM Mobile Data and Ericsson to turn the Ericsson-developed Mobitex wireless data network into a two-way paging and wireless email network. In 1995, RIM started shipping their Interactive Pager which allowed users to receive and send messages over the internet via the Mobitex wireless data network. RAM Mobile Data was the US operator of Mobitex network and introduced the Interactive Pager service as RAMfirst Interactive Paging.
When manufactured, each Blackberry device is assigned a unique eight digit PIN (personal identification number). This allows identification of each Blackberry and ensures that mail destined for a particular individual is delivered correctly.
During a synchronisation, the redirector associates a PIN with an email account, thereafter making certain that mail in that account is sent to the device with that PIN.
With a Blackberry, the PIN differs from the ESN (Electronic Serial Number) in that the ESN is tracked by the Blackberry reseller and mobile phone carrier. While the PIN is tracked by the Blackberry wireless network provider. Some resellers may also track the PIN, but Blackberry wireless network providers do not track the ESN.
Snyder added that with Boxtone monitoring a Blackberry installation, one of the benefits used most often is the Help Desk module. He said this provides real-time user analysis of faults such as a full mailbox or pending message count or external BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) problems. Snyder said that Boxtone has an interface for sending a PIN-to-PIN and email test to the device.
Snyder added that Boxtone monitoring provides a graphical representation of the data that can be found on the BES log files and configuration databases as well as providing real-time trending of that information. He said that Boxtone alerts support staff (via email or SNMP - simple network protocol) when problems arise or certain trended values go above a set threshold. Their patented Smart MP alerting engines apply intelligent algorithms to the data it sees and helps it alert appropriately. Boxtone also detects other faults such as a messaging agent down, or SRP connection down which means your data network is not talking to the RIM data network.
Boxtone provides a way to fix a problem with 1-Click. For example, if a user calls the the help desk and complains that their activation has failed, the help desk representative can bring up the information about that user and see what may be causing the problem.
Many users believe one of the most useful graphs which BoxTone provides is a visual indication on how an email is flowing between Mail server, BES, and Blackberry handheld devices. Snyder explained that with just a glance at this graph, help desk staff can determine where an email delivery problem is occurring. They can tell if email is flowing from mail server to device almost instantly. A change in the graphical lines tells help desk staff if they must troubleshoot a device, or escalate the ticket to another team if they see delays between mail server and BES.
In February, Snyder said Boxtone became a member of the Microsoft System Center Alliance, a collection of organisations chosen to extend Microsoft's System Center management solutions.
Snyder is a strong advocate of knowledge-based decision making. He believes Boxtone is the premier Blackberry monitoring tool. So does Alan Brenner, senior vice president for Blackberry Platforms at RIM. Brenner made special mention of the high reliability and value Boxtone adds to the Blackberry network during the Dow Jones Wireless Innovation conference.
This ITExaminer writer suggests the newly appointed Blackberry service provider for India, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), talk with Alan Snyder about Boxtone. X
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